A trip into the desert

[Jay-qu]

Made my way out into the Arizonan desert last night for my first dark sky with my new SW 100ED scope and CG5 mount. Wonderfully dark skies and only a light breeze. I am thoroughly impressed with my new setup, which (mostly) performs better than my 8" dob. In between our visual survey of the sky I took a few shots with my 500D and x0.85 reducer/flattener:

- M42 is 30 x 15sec, ISO200
- M51 is 25 x 2min, ISO3200

The wildly different ISO and exposure times were part of my testing the new setup, I am pretty happy with the how steady the tracking was over 2 mins!

Comments or suggestions on post processing are welcomed. Thanks for looking

[leon]

Nice effort indeed, nothing like a dark site to practice in, so you said tracking, did that mean not auto guiding of sorts, and if not the mount performed very nicely.

The second shot seems a little off track, other than that great captures, well done.

Leon

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

Yep ...!! Not too bad at all .

Flash

[Jay-qu]

Nope, no autoguiding. Next time I will take a bit more care doing the polar align and see how that goes.

J

[Ross G]

Nice shots.

Ross.